Before 1949, African American children in West Baton Rouge Parish attended small scattered schools in publicly and privately owned buildings, including classrooms in churches and lodge halls, and these facilities generally offered only 7th- and 8th-grade education, requiring students to leave the parish for high school. After Sam Colwell, overseer on Henry Cohn's Carolina Plantation, requested a local high school, Henry Cohn donated property for a school to be built within five years and named for the Cohn family. The school board obtained a frame building from Harding Field and moved it to Port Allen, where Cohn Junior-Senior High School opened on August 31, 1949, with 123 students in grades 8 through 12. Its original faculty were principal Oliver Baham, James Gray in math, Johnny Hayes in science, Nora Hartson in English, Shirley Baham in home economics, and Julia Coffey in social science, and it was placed under the administration of James Moody, Sr., standing supervisor of schools for black students in the parish. James Gray and his students partitioned the structure into 10 classrooms, a gym, kitchen, restrooms, and showers. Within two years of the school's opening, African American student enrollment in the parish school system reached 99 percent. During segregation, the school served the West Baton Rouge African American community as a gathering place, with its gym used for school and community events. As the Civil Rights Movement gained strength, desegregation initially remained optional for its students, who could choose to attend Port Allen High School in a dual educational system, but most remained there. In 1969, a final court ruling ordered the school board to dismantle the dual system, close the school, integrate the student population, and require all students to attend either Port Allen or Brusly High Schools. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in June 2004 through the efforts of DOC-DHL, Inc., a nonprofit group that sought to restore the building, provide mentoring for African American students, and create an early childhood education center, but renovation costs proved too high, and the original building and two additions from the 1950s were demolished in November 2014.